Communication systems and platforms are often combinations of copper, wireless and fiber optic media. Transmission rates and capacities have increased and are now measured in gigabytes and terabytes per second to a contemporary standard of ten gigabytes per second. Research continues to move transmission rates toward petabytes and beyond.
In order to achieve, maintain, and even surpass these transmission rates, transmission media and in particular fiber optic conductors must be fabricated and maintained to exacting standards and tolerances. This is particularly so in the fabrication, manufacture, installation, maintenance and testing of fiber optic component end faces. These end faces frequently become contaminated with dirt, dust, oil, grease, and other debris. Contamination, dry, fluidic and combinations thereof can have a significant impact on the quality (e.g., speed and integrity) of transmission across fiber optic networks. As such, cleaning the fiber optic connectors preserves the quality of these very high-speed transmissions. Various types of fiber optic connectors are known. Some of these connectors permit the joining of single optical fibers. Other types of connectors more efficiently permit the joining or connecting of multiple fibers in a single physical connector body. The various types of connectors as such have differing physical structures, connector configurations, components and the like.
In order to properly clean fiber optic connectors, some manner by which the connectors can be inspected is required. Nevertheless, many such connectors are cleaned “blind”. That is, the connectors are cleaned without a direct or indirect visual inspection. A direct viewing of the connector can be made using some type of inspection device, such as a magnifying glass to protect the eye from being subjected to laser light energy.
Another way in which connectors are inspected is using a fiber optic video scope or amplified video camera to provide an enhanced view of small micron particles (on the order of 1-3 microns). While these inspection techniques provide protection for the user's eye in that they are indirect (e.g., via a video camera) viewing, such devices are limited in their field of view and offer limited 2-dimensional fiber optic viewing. Hand-held inspection devices typically use a paddle with magnification between about 125× to about 400×, and capture images in the range of about 250 microns (μm) to about 500 μm radius of the core.
Moreover, there is often contamination that cannot be discerned within the field of view of known video scopes. This can be due to the nature of the contamination, e.g., dry, fluidic or combinations thereof, the location of the contamination, e.g., across the fiber end face, along the length of the fiber, along the ferrule and the like, and other factors present. Furthermore, video inspection scopes that have 100-200× magnification can suffer from lower than desired resolution of debris and contamination.
Accordingly, there is a need for a fiber optic inspection device that can be used to effectively inspect a fiber optic connector. Such as device provides a higher degree of inspection quality than an unaided visual inspection and has a wider field of view than known video inspection scopes. Desirably, such a device provides inspection capabilities along the entire end face of the ferrule, as well as along the length of the ferrule assembly, and assures high quality inspection in a low cost device. More desirably still, such a device can be used with a wide variety fiber optic connectors precluding the need for multiple tools for inspection of different connector types.